May 24, 2007

Breathing in Buckyball Carbon

The following is excerpted (in green fonts) from an articlein theThe New Atlantis.

Nanoethics as a Discipline?by Adam Keiper

Rice University nanotechnologist Vicki Colvin, the director of the university’s Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology, described in 2002 how, “in a field with more than 12,000 citations a year,” her team had been “stunned to discover no prior research in developing nanomaterials risk assessment models and no toxicology studies devoted to synthetic nanomaterials.” In the years since then, dozens of studies have begun to examine those problems, including a widely reported study showing that buckyballs—a type of manmade carbon molecule—could cause brain damage in fish. But the research done so far has only scratched the surface of potential nanotoxicology questions. Many unanswered questions remain. Which nanomaterials are biodegradable and which persist in the body or the environment? Some nanoparticles kill microorganisms; could their increased production and eventual dispersal disrupt food chains? How can factory workers best be protected from exposure to nanomaterials that could damage their lungs or other organs? In a recent lecture at the National Academy of Sciences, Harvard researcher George Whitesides pointed to the deliciously convoluted acronym ADME/Tox/PK/PD—for adsorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, toxicology, pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics—and warned, “We don’t know anything about that. We don’t know about any of those things for nanoparticles.” Such questions would be complex enough if just one kind of substance were involved, but the variety and many different applications of nanoparticles and nanomaterials make the study of their health and environmental effects bewilderingly complicated.